Wednesday, July 20, 2016

I recently found this intro to the first chapter of Night on the Invisible Sun. It kind of states the philosophy behind how chapter one came to be. I wrote it when I was 25 years old. 14 years later I still don't mind it, which I can't say of most early writings.

Intro essay for chapter 1

The Tugs and Pulls of
the Modern World

I lived under the false pretense
that I would die young. I set the age of death at 21; whether consciously or
unconsciously established I do not know, but I always knew that I would die before
my 21st birthday. Come to find out later, all three of my brothers
shared this same false pretense. Although all of us had numerous brushes with
death—none of us died. And so, I can honestly say that meaning in life did not
precociously bloom within my breast.
Everything I did in my life before the age of 21 was done under the two
simple philosophies of action, reaction, and pleasure versus pain.

Life claimed
no mystical or deeper meaning on me, so, I heeded no mystical or deep credo
other than those mentioned. At the age of 21, I concluded it was time to
develop a new philosophy on life, but it was not easy. Actions that start out
as soft and sweet as honey quickly ossify into hardened habits. I found I was
like a little boy lost at sea; so long tossed to and fro by the proximate waves,
flotsam without direction, without paying attention to the myriad markers I had
passed. As awareness awoke within me, I found I was clueless as to which
direction I should now take. The shock from all of a sudden waking to the awful
reality of my situation, aware of myself and the precarious straits I was in,
was overpowering. I realized I was
always aware of the situation, my previous philosophy had just caused me to
suppress such awareness because it was an overload of feelings and such
awareness was either too abstract or too daunting to think about. How could
life as absurd as it was for me as a child, mean anything more than the
absurdity it presented to me? Here I
began battling that question, trying to develop a meaningful philosophy that
would allow me to overthrow the already crystallized patterns and rituals of a
meaningless life, but a shadow is harder to shake than I had imagined, and here
I was, in the middle of a starless, black ocean with no light to act as a
luminary guide—only equipped with the mistrusted light locked within
myself. And I knew that awareness only
comes once to a life and then it never leaves; going back to a previous
philosophy is improbable and in most cases impossible because awareness is like
a man realizing mid-flight that he has no wings, he cannot go back to the
precipice he jumped off of. The only
logical step for that man is to try as rapidly as possible to devise some new
way to brace himself from the brunt of his fall, or unsoundly the man can
continue to imagine he has wings to try to dissuade himself from truthfully
imagining the brunt of his fall that is rapidly approaching. Of course, either
way, the end of that fall is death, but the one who truthfully faces that fall
is aware of what the quickly approaching earth means to his life and perhaps in
his resourcefulness he might have contrived some way to brace himself for the
fall and avoid such an abrupt end (aim for the trees). Who knows, but nine years after realizing I
was in a free fall, this is what I found; this is my new philosophical guide;
hopefully it passes off as something more than just a new anesthesia that
serves the same purpose as my old philosophy; hopefully it is not the old
philosophy parading around under the clever disguise of a new name.